Process intelligence company Celonis, which initiated an antitrust lawsuit against ERP software giant SAP nearly a year ago, has come out on the wrong side of an early ruling.
A federal judge in San Francisco dismissed claims by Celonis that SAP blocked access to data in its systems to give an unfair advantage to its own Signavio unit. The judge said Celonis can try to revise and refile the claims.
Celonis and Signavio both offer process mining software that maps processes and identifies inefficiencies in workflows. Celonis is a company that developed process mining from its infancy while SAP, the world’s largest vendor of enterprise resource planning software, acquired Signavio nearly five years ago.
A representative for Celonis said that the company will amend its complaint in the coming weeks “with additional facts to further underscore SAP’s efforts to stifle competition, and are confident we will unearth further evidence of its misconduct.”
A spokesperson for SAP declined to comment.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria wrote in his ruling that Celonis alleged “that SAP’s conduct has caused multiple Celonis customers to consider not renewing their contracts (and instead switch to Signavio) and has required Celonis to reassure those customers to prevent them from doing so. This was plausibly a disruption to Celonis’s contractual relationships.”
